Part One

The Death Dream

I have to keep telling myself where I am because there are so many ways to set yourself in place and time: the room with its windows frozen blind inside the house, inside the town, inside the county and the state, inside this addled country. It is hard not to mark this latest detour on the map of my life at my age, a detour I wonder whether I could have foreseen. Or mark it on the landscape of this body and of my marriage—both complicated, both worn, and more and less perishable than I expected. But I have to simplify of course so I don’t panic: I am in our bed where I can keep warm. I am where for more than half our days together my husband and I slept and often didn’t sleep, never enough in recent years. I was safe here when he was alive. I tell myself I am safe here with him dead too and I want so much to believe it.  

They decided who could stay and who had to go, go now or there’d be no going. I told them no when the man who was once a boy I knew well sent his men around to invite me to leave, though invite is too gentle a word. 

There’d be compensation, they said. Here’s fairness—theirs. There’d be others who’d come to buy what we left behind. People like them. This was a corrective, a necessary Civil War, about the utopia they’re after, or that one man is after, a man who’s managed to lead others there, organized them well. Their hands and their hearts. They have the power plant. They took it by force and keep it by force. They have the gas stations and the local cable lines, the cell towers. 

They are using a long cold snap to help us go. A killing cold. I have a generator and canned goods, ancient jars of pickles and beets, plenty of bottled water. I thought I could make it until one government or another—local, state, federal—came and insisted that the United States remain united, despite the odds on it pulling itself apart at last. I keep listening for the helicopters and drones, the gunfire. I have been waiting to feel the house shake with the order we’d all agreed on and have believed in for so long taking itself back. But outside the house has come days of quiet, except for the sound of the usual traffic that is not usual and the animals calling from the pasture out back, and there is the cold that keeps coming in to this old house once the generator quit; and the cold that has come into my body, starting with my extremities, which has brought with it every pain this body of mine has ever known and also every joy. So much joy. 

They said to me as if from an old script that’s been used too many times (I tried not to laugh): Nobody gets hurt if you go now. But how could I hurt more than I did already and how could I go when only four and a half months ago, which seems a day, an hour ago, my husband died in this bed beside me? A stroke, another. He woke up in the night and said to me or someone, “There’s snow in the mountains” when there was no snow. Not yet. Then he was quiet. 

Did he die then or later? He may not even have woken up to die or maybe he did while he thought he was dreaming, then he was. His death dream. And it must have confused him, because though his body had stopped beside me, as empty now as an old shirt, he didn’t leave. He’s still here and I can feel him in the walls and the curtains, the loose stair railing, the toilet that ran but now is frozen inside this house of frozen everything, alive in death, and out of the corner of my eye, I think I see him. I can smell him. Not the smell of laundry, but his smell in spots so very strong, like those warm spots in lakes and oceans and how good they feel even if you wonder if you’re swimming around in somebody’s piss. His smell, of the man I loved and sometimes hated, it was never sour to me even when he made it into his 80s. A clean old man, he’d say and laugh, at eighty-one. There is the spice of his sweat, under his arms, sweet and piney and waxy, and his breath so often like green apples from the water he drank and drank. His body was always thirsty. So thirsty. 

Even before they came, I heard him at night at the piano. I put it down to my grief. Old age. When things were not in the same place they were the night before, I told myself I was mistaken. Like anyone would. But once you head into your sixties and seventies, you doubt yourself more. You do things you cannot imagine you would—forgetting, vanishing into daydreams, holding on when you should not. 

It took me longer than it should have to change the sheets even as they soured with what he let go when his spirit let go of his body, but the pillow case and the pillow, still shaped to his head, I leave as is.  

And there’s my saying no when I should have said yes and gone to safety on the other side of their new border, to my sister and her children, to my friends, to another man who has loved me since I was a girl for no good reason except that he is stubborn, and now I am a woman freezing to death in her bed who hears her husband playing Schubert. Then Chopsticks. To tease me, to tell me to get up, old girl. Get up and leave. 

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They knocked but they waited only so long for me to respond before they came in—two men. I was nearly to the door, nearly had my hand on the knob when they pushed in. I had unlocked the door a half hour before to attend to a bird feeder on the front porch. It was late morning, and my hate was already there before I saw them fully, my hate in the hand reaching to twist the knob, even in the door that they pushed open and that I know so well, like an old friend. It is painted red, not the red I wanted but that I came to love because my husband chose it and kept trying to persuade me to it. Not a cherry or blue red, which I’d hoped for, but a purplish one, one that on that February day they came struck me as barely hiding a bruise in a door that was opening without my say-so. 

They did not hide their hate, but I did mine at first, once they were inside, standing in our short entryway, at the base of stairs that led to bedrooms, this one that I’m in now, another for guests that was also used as an office, and a full bathroom with an old claw-foot tub I have spent much of my life scrubbing clean. 

I don’t have to scrub anything now, and it is a relief. I want to hear more of the music I’m hearing. I want to feel everything I can now—even the pain coming—because this is the last I will know of having this body, isn’t it? This home inside this house in what is no longer welcome territory, if it ever really was. 

I am determined to love the end of this being here, in this bag of skin, for all the days I have not loved it. We are too often reminded of our uselessness, our lack of beauty, fitness, as early as our fifties, but I will not have that now. I will not believe in it. And that is what I felt looking at these men who came to scare me: I do not believe in you. 

Of course, they tried to pass for lookalikes, for soldiers who all wear the same uniform to communicate that they are joined in a common cause. They were roughly bearded, wearing the same green caps, new hunting vests and old thermal jerseys, pants made from what looked like canvas and boots as stiff as they both appeared to be, as I felt they must need to be to willthemselves to be stones rolling into places that were not theirs in order to roll over others.